IDC came out with their 2Q 2011 worldwide server market revenue report on Aug. 23, 2011 which shows that IBM may be poised to take over the #1 spot within the next few quarters.

According to IDC, worldwide server sales (all servers, not just blade servers) for Q2 2011 factory revenues increased 17.9 % yearover year to $13.2 billion in the 2nd quarter of 2011 (2Q11). Interestingly, this marks a 2.7% greater percentage of sales but $2 billion less revenue than the last time we reported IDC numbers for Q4 2010. They also reported the blade server market continued to accelerate with growth exploding in the quarter to a revenue increase of 26.9% year over year (vs 12.6% growth in 4Q10). Shipments increased 6.2% (vs .4% reported growth for 4Q10). According to IDC, nearly 89% of all blade revenue is driven by x86 systems which is an increase of 5% since 4Q10. Blades now represent 21.2% of all x86 server revenue. This shows continued steady growth for the blade server segment and a strong future for x86 systems.

Probably the most interesting aspect of the report is that HP and IBM now share the #1 spot in the overall server market. IBM earned 30.5% of revenue share while HP drew in 29.8%. With regard to the blades market specifically it is a completely different story:

#1 market share: HP continued to lose their dominance dropping from 53.4% in Q4 2010 to 51.9% in Q2 2011.

According to Jed Scaramella, research manager, Enterprise Servers at IDC, “Blade revenue growth accelerated in the second quarter and remained the fastest growing form factor. All major vendors experienced double-digit growth in their blade business.”

The trend is pretty clear in showing that while the percentages for the top spots continue to shift, the market is still growing strongly and there seems to be plenty of room for all the top players.